An excerpt about the latest group project out of Central Saint Martins from 1 Granary – the CSM student website:

The Ethical Collaborative Fashion Knit/Print Project at Central Saint Martins is a group project that is aimed to create forward, contemporary fashion, made out of eco friendly materials. This year students collaborated with Poor Communities And Trade Programme in Africa and MODAFUSION – a Brazilian organization that supports women living in the Favelas in Rio. We are featuring the group that won this year, Oshun, who made an amazing collection with innovative fabrics, social development, and amazing details.

Q: Tell us a little bit about the starting point of this project.

Oshun: We made our collection drawing inspiration from Brazilian and African cultures, where Moda Fusion and Ethical Fashion (the companies we did this project for) are based. In particular we got inspired by Candomble, a religion practiced on both continents. We wanted to find something that meant we could draw inspiration from both places so we were lucky to find out about this. They practice a lot of rituals involving body and face painting and wear a lot of voluminous garments for ceremonies. It was their simplicity in shape and layered look that inspired much of our silhouettes, and body art and traditional craft work that influenced our hands-on print and knit ideas.

Our focus for this project was to make a modern and exciting collection that can be produced in places where access to materials and expensive machinery is limited. I think one of the most important things for us was that we wanted to avoid making anything that looked too recycled. Sustainable fashion doesn’t necessarily mean using rubbish to make stuff it can be infused more subtly. For example we used Tencel yarn for the ribbed tops which is made from biodegradable wood pulp, and also using printing techniques that could be emulated in both Africa and Brazil where resources are minimal. We tried as hard as we could to use materials and techniques that can be realistically sourced and used in these places.